


Être Crevé

by Tayine



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Multilingual Madness, Psychological Trauma, Survivor Guilt, i'm shooting for the record of the most amount of languages used in a single fic, lots of blood and violence and injuries here, sorry not sorry but it's sad dad booker time and he doesn't get much comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:40:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25715215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: A series of one-shots exploring Booker's character and his relationships with the other members of the team.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 159





	1. Chapter 1

**1960.**

It wasn’t just the people they had left behind.

Booker woke violently, wrenching up from death where it had briefly held him shackled, leaving him broken and bloody against cold aluminum. There were imprints in his cheek where the texture of the floor had sunk into his dead flesh, and they itched as they filled. Blood began to drip from the wounds again until they closed, and the feeling came back into his arms and legs.

He moved one arm beneath himself to push up and felt the ground wobble. He stilled, waiting for more of his bearings to return.

Memories were second, after pain, and he remembered the screeching of tires, the _chk-chk-chk_ of the rubber skipping on the road as the bus overturned. He remembered the scream of steel and glass and human flesh, ripping and tearing into asphalt, burned away by friction as it was dragged by its own momentum.

His other wrist popped back into place, and he was able to better distribute his weight. He raised his head, blinking away the blood that was stinging his eyes.

The bus was on its side, the ordered rows of cloth seats torn and jumbled in the chaos of the crash. There was no movement, no more sound except steam escaping from the radiator. There were bodies, some packed in with him, some wedged between the snapped and dangling seats. His was the only life left in the bus.

He’d been near the front during the drive, but he was all the way in the back now, thrown forty feet. He’d probably pinballed backwards, hitting seat backs and steel supports and other people. Someone’s jaw had broken on his calf, someone else’s neck from his elbow.

The bus wobbled again as he shifted, and he breathed with the panic of the unprepared. There was an equilibrium that he was disturbing. The wreckage was not flush to the mountain road, so his only assumption was of it dangling somehow. He turned his head slowly, taking in the unblemished view above, beyond the glass that had popped and shattered in the windows. It was overcast, mid-afternoon. He’d been dozing in his seat, sick with motion sickness and withdrawals. The bus had left Nice at 6am, but he wasn’t sure if they had crossed the border into Italy yet.

“ _Putain_ ,” he whispered to himself, wondering if he should just run for it, push up to standing, vault over as many seats as he could, and if the bus fell, it fell. He’d have a hard few days, especially if the drop was significant, but he could be out of there before the crash was discovered by passing motorists investigating the new scars ripped into the road, drag marks leading down to the vehicle’s final resting place.

“ _Ehi_.”

Booker froze. He took quick stock. Female, young, tremulous, coming from the front.

“ _C'è qualcuno_?”

“ _Si_ ,” he said, without thinking it through. He switched to English in an experiment. “Are you all right?”

There was a pause. “My… my legs.”

“ _D’accord_ ,” he said, more to himself. Now there was more. Now there was something else. “I’m coming up to you.”

“The bus is, ehm…”

“ _Instabile, si_ , I know. I’ll be careful.” He dug his fingers into the hole where the closest window had been, slithering forward on his belly. A corpse shifted slightly, putting more weight onto his legs, and he resisted the urge to kick it away.

“Are you hurt?”

Booker’s gut clenched. The voice had asked with worry, but worry for him, not for the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to save her. “ _Ouais_ , but I’m fine. I can get to you.”

“My legs are, ehm…”

In the fog of his mind, he couldn’t think of the word ‘pinned’ in Italian. He knew what she meant to say. If they had just been broken, she would have moved around before he did, and there would be more pain in her voice. “ _Come ti chiami_?”

“Giulia. _E Lei_?”

“Booker,” he said, using the nickname, using the identity he’d let himself be consumed by.

“Booker. Be careful.”

“I will.” He pulled free of the tangle of bodies, but the bus groaned, and he stilled.

“Are we going to fall?”

“No,” he said through gritted teeth. “I won’t let us fall.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” He made another small, even movement, a test. The bus was settling, maybe, gaining traction against the road or the safety barrier that had caught it. He wouldn’t dare try to stand, but he was determined to crawl. His belly dragged, his arms doing all the work. He went like that for several long beats, sweat pooling at his hairline and in the small of his back, as he strained his muscles and strained his hearing. It was slow going, but every inch helped.

“Booker?”

“I’m here.”

“I can’t get free.”

“Don’t worry, Giulia.” He breathed the slick, oily air inside the bus, the veins in his forehead popping. All his injuries were gone by now, but he felt the ghosts of them, stinging like gnats he wished he could swat away.

At the halfway mark, he raised up onto his knees. The bus grumbled at him for escaping its game of seesaw, but it did not give way. He was able to crouch-walk, using the seats on his left as a sort of ladder, pulling at them like he was climbing.

Giulia was in the second row, on the right side where the bus lay defeated. She had been across the aisle from him. Booker lowered himself down, taking care with every movement. She was young, even younger than he’d pictured from the tenor of her voice, with curly hair pulled back with a ribbon. She was lying twisted onto her back looking up at the ceiling of the bus’s opposite side, her legs hidden by the crush of the first row of seats. She was bloody, but her eyes were bright and alert.

“Where else are you hurt?” he asked as he bent over her.

“ _Nient’altro_ , I think.” She was gazing at him with the same amount of shock as he carried on his own expressive face. He was bloody in a way that almost seemed impossible to have survived through, though it could be argued that maybe the blood wasn’t his, that he’d hit the back of the bus on top of the other bodies, cushioned from the impact that had in actuality killed him.

“Okay.” He put his hands on the front seat back and tugged, but even a hundred and fifty years of strength was no match for automotive steel. Giulia watched this with a grim, set expression, but he saw her fear. Her chest was rising and falling in short gasps, breaths that would leave her lungs unfulfilled. She probably had a few broken ribs and wasn’t even feeling them yet.

He switched positions and went for the seat where she had been sitting instead, wondering if he could force it back enough to make an opening. At the last and largest tug, the bus’s skeleton growled a warning, rocking enough that he had to regain his balance with his sore calves. Giulia had made a small sound of fear, but she was still, like she could placate the beast.

“I need leverage,” he said, looking around and seeing nothing. The front of the bus was an open, gaping mouth now that the windshield glass was gone. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” the girl whispered.

With an awkward vault, he stepped out into the blindingly white light of the outside and wiped some blood from his eyes, smearing it across his eyelids. He could see the path the bus had gouged into the asphalt, white cuts hundreds of feet long on the road. They had taken a curve badly. Booker did not dwell on this for long, though anger at the needless suffering and fear and death took him deep for a second. What a pointless, stupid loss of life.

There was small, jagged piece of the bus sticking out from the side of it like a hangnail. When he put a hand to it and did an experimental tug, the bus did not react. He twisted and pried at it, bending it backwards to weaken its connection. The sharp metal dug into his hands, biting through his skin, but he got it free in the end, peeling it off with a final twist. He waited for his hands to heal up, his fingers shaking, and then reentered the bus.

Giulia had her eyes closed, but they reopened when she heard him duck through the hole of the collapsed front end.

“Any pain?” Booker asked, wondering bitterly if this was all for nothing anyway.

“Not too much.” But her voice trembled, and her hands were clenched.

He drove the strip of metal between the two broken seats, scraping it along the fabric upholstery. When it was wedged, he pressed down with all his weight, breathing jerkily through gritted teeth.

Giulia moaned a bit as the pressure let up. She moved as if to rise, able to pull her legs out when there was just a little more room.

The bus jerked, upsetting Booker’s hold on the metal. It snapped back up, slicing clean through one palm, and the space he had created closed with a dull thud. Giulia’s eyes popped, and she howled.

“I’m sorry, _mi dispiace, désolé,_ ” he muttered frantically, moving his injured hand away so that she wouldn’t see it while reaching for her with the other one.

She choked a string of Italian oaths, holding her hands to her face. He knelt carefully, touching her hands, letting her twine their fingers together. She had his gaze now, breathing harshly, teary and red-faced but oh so brave. He waited, holding the eye contact, holding her hand.

“I have to try again. Are you ready?”

She nodded and wiped her face when Booker released her to stand again, his feet planted on the wall of the bus.

He repeated the levering action, powering through any pain signals his body was giving off. He would be fine, in the end.

“I was going to see the Olympics,” Giulia said thickly. “Where were you going?”

Booker inhaled rapidly through his nose and pressed. “To meet my family.”

The seat was rising again, groaning through the sound of the sharp metal tearing through fabric and cushioning.

“Go,” he grunted.

She wiggled, pulling her legs up and moaning at the movement. She flipped onto her side, scraping delicate skin on the jagged edges of the broken windows beneath her bare arms, but she pulled free, curling her knees up to her chest.

Booker knew better than to release the lever with one fast drop of the seat, but it had other ideas. The metal strip sliced cleanly through the seat back and lost its snug positioning; the broken seat fell apart with a jolt, and the bus screamed.

His heart leapt into his throat. “Go, go,” he cried, bending to help her to her feet, and his footing was dragged beneath him as the bus began to tremble. He lifted her, but the front of the bus was lifting too, into the air as the heavier rear, packed with bodies, descended maddeningly over the edge of the cliffside where it had been teetering. Booker leapt forward, dragging Giulia by the arm, and he got to the broken hole of the windshield right as the bus’s center of gravity finally gave way. He fell, stumbling over the uneven flooring, and his blood- and sweat-slick hand slid down her arm to grasp at nothing. He landed on the road, the wind knocked out of him.

The bus screamed again, or maybe it was a human cry this time, as it scraped its torn side down over the edge and disappeared beneath the horizon of the roadside.

Booker waited for his broken shoulder, the one he’d landed on, to right itself, before he sat up slowly, his elbows up on his drawn knees. He put his hands into his hair, feeling the crust of dried blood, and sat that way for a long time.

Those were the ones he carried with him, too. Not just the ones he’d left behind, but the ones he’d failed to save.


	2. Chapter 2

**1918.**

The truest cruelty of their immortality, Booker had learned, was that they were not immune to sickness, or pain, or grief. Death wouldn’t come to end it. Their suffering was prolonged and repeated, again and again, over and over. And unlike the wounded war vets whose knees swelled and ached when it rained, his family had no clear scars they could point to, no breasts full of medals and ribbons to wear that explained why they suffered as they did.

Joe was the first to cough. They were in Ghent, quietly assisting evacuations and refugees. The armistice had been signed, and Christmas was coming. They had found an old textile mill on the outskirts of the city, its ceiling collapsed on one end, but inside it was warm near the fireplace. They returned there each night, rubbing sore limbs and wearily unwrapping cheese and bread bought from the haggard bakers in the city center.

Booker woke in the middle of the night, hungover from the sweet wine he had regretted as soon as he’d begun drinking during dinner. They had found and hauled four cast iron bed frames into the mill, lining them up in a row near the fireplace and pushing the rest of the broken and rotting furniture to the outskirts of the wide main spinning floor. The fire projected shadows like stacked skeletons onto the flaking walls, their ghostly limbs dancing and beckoning.

He heard whispering to his left, where Joe and Nicky had pushed their bed frames together. They were arguing in raspy Arabic, and Joe coughed again.

“What’s going on?” he asked softly. To his right, he felt, more than heard, Andy wake.

“Joe is getting sick,” Nicky said.

“I’m not.”

Booker sat up, rubbing at his face. His skin was greasy. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He is coughing.”

Joe coughed in response, his angry retort drowned out by the sound.

Booker looked at Andromache, their leader, asking what to do. Sickness wasn’t something they had to endure often, especially the older ones; he didn’t think he’d seen her with a fever once in the hundred years of standing at her side. But it did happen.

“We’ll get him some water,” Andy said, standing with the soundless movement of a jungle cat. There was a well with a pump just outside, supplying the textile mill’s needs for its flax processing.

“I’m all right, boss!” called Joe, before he leaned back against his pillow and coughed again, much more violently. Nicky muttered soothing words in Italian, stroking his cheek, while Booker heaved heavily up into standing, joining her to carry the dented canteens they drank from.

“Is it the same as this spring?” he asked her quietly, pumping the handle and waiting for the gush of water. It was very cold outside, and he shivered in the darkness.

“It might be,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the flicker of firelight coming through the dusty windows. “It will be in the city by now, if so.”

Booker shook his head, hunching his shoulders around his neck from the cold. Joe couldn’t die from it, like the ones earlier in the year, but it would be miserable for him for a few weeks. The stories that had come out of the United States and the troop trains that were ushering people home had been unpleasant.

They brought the canteens back inside. Nicky was sitting fully up on his side of the beds, his hand resting on Joe’s chest, as if to feel his heartbeat there. Joe was still lying supine, already weak. Andy kneeled, putting a hand on his forehead, and offered the canteen.

“I’m fine,” he repeated, turning his head away to refuse the water.

“Yusuf,” Nicky said in a dangerous tone.

Andromache had given them the nicknames. Booker had laughed heartily when she’d explained the joke of his, and it had become a spot of tenderness between them all. As with their ages, Andy’s was the oldest. There had been other diminutives over the centuries, in many languages, but these were modern and approachable, able to be spoken aloud in public in most of the countries where they moved.

Joe took the water, sullen. They waited in silence for a beat as he drank, as if they were expecting something. When he took the canteen away from his mouth, he cleared his throat and scowled. “It’s not like I’m going to die,” he grunted. Then he coughed wetly.

“We should get some sleep,” Nicky said to the room at large. “There will be others soon.”

Booker knew they had seen plagues, entire villages or cities or kingdoms ravaged by sickness. They had passed people in the streets who died where they fell, too weak to hold themselves up anymore. They had walked through rivers of blood, bile, vomit, and excrement. They had sat at bedsides, wiping chins clean of foamy spittle and mucus. They had seen the lowest lows of humanity, people at their weakest, most desperate, most unclean. That his family still even attempted their nursing and their care was a source of grudging respect. He wouldn’t have kept at it, if he’d been alone.

The illness spread in its second wave with a wildfire’s pace, consuming and unstoppable. Every day there were more of them, stumbling into hospitals with handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths, flecked red with blood. Newspapers howled fear and fuss. Families were separated and devoured, and Booker spent his hours digging graves as church bells tolled day in and day out.

Joe, too, was eaten by it. He passed entire days without speaking, hovering in a semi-consciousness that was probably preferable to the agony of slow suffocation. Nicky would tip bowls of water and milk against his lips, whispering for him to drink, to help his strength. Joe wouldn’t die like the others, but he would wish it. Booker knew he would, if it was him.

But it was never him. He took hands that were held out in grief, complete strangers rocking and pleading in Dutch and French, and waited for the waves of their despair to crest and crash around them as they sat together. He felt it for them, and he cried with them, and then he went back to his family and sat in front of the fireplace while one of their own drowned on his own lungs.

One morning blotches of deeply bruised maroon appeared on Joe’s cheeks beneath the scrub of his unkempt beard. Nicky said today would be the worst for him, and Booker offered to sit with him, as he’d done with the widows and the orphans in the city, the lost souls who simultaneously felt more human and yet more foreign to him than the extraordinary beings of his own family.

Nicky refused to leave Joe at first, but he was known in this city as a doctor, a traveling medical officer who had seen the sickness during its first wave and knew how to make patients comfortable. Andy had to order him away, one hand on his shoulder, quietly insisting in a way that made it impossible to refuse. “Booker will stay,” she murmured.

Booker stayed. He sat on Nicky’s side of the bed, reading aloud from De Gentenaar. He watched as the discoloration spread across Joe’s skin, who was turned onto his side in the effort of finding a position where he wasn’t suffocating. He listened to the harsh, fluttery breaths and wiped Joe’s slick forehead with a cool cloth.

“Can you drink?” he asked softly at one point in mid-afternoon. He had just stoked the fire, but the winter air in the textile mill was cold, the heat sapping through the stone walls. He’d wrapped the blanket from his own bed around Joe’s chest, tucking it beneath him, and then he held one of the canteens they’d taken from somewhere on the Western Front, his hand curled around the back of Joe’s neck.

“لا,” Joe croaked without opening his eyes.

“You have to.” Booker considered for a moment, then switched the canteen for the cloth he’d been using to wipe away the clammy sweat on Joe’s skin. He dipped one corner into the shallow bowl of water and came closer, dangling it just above Joe’s cracked and split lips. “Try for me.”

Joe whispered an Arabic oath, then switched back to English. “I’m dying today.”

“Probably, yes. Sweet oblivion for a few minutes.”

Joe chuckled once, the sound of a horsehair brush being dragged against stone. “Do you think I’ll be well when I come back?”

“I don’t know how sickness works. Would it help more to give you hope or to take it away?”

“There’s always hope, يا أخي الصغير.”

Booker sighed, tenderness and bitterness rising together in his gullet. That was the difference between him and his brothers, his sister. “Drink for me,” he murmured instead, and watched with gratification as Joe’s mouth worried at the soaked cloth, sucking down the beads of moisture.

Later, Joe died beside Booker. His chest rose and fell in shorter, unhappier gasps, until there were none at all. Booker held his hand and waited for the pulse of life to return. When it did, it came slow, slogging through the illness that still wracked his body.

“How much longer?” Joe moaned softly, a whine at the injustice. He coughed, and Booker wiped away the thick, brown sputum he produced.

“I’ll be here with you,” Booker said. “However long it takes.”

It took weeks. The death toll in Ghent and the rest of Europe was becoming overwhelming, and Andy had begun talking about moving on. The war was over; the innocents were no longer in danger.

Joe opened his eyes one morning and rolled of his own volition. Nicky had instructed the others to turn him periodically, allowing the bedsores to scab over and heal, but this time it was Joe doing it, pushing up onto an elbow. His curls were longer than Booker had ever seen them before, and they were matted with sweat and friction from the pillow. Nicky had taken to trimming away the worst of the snarls, but he was no barber.

“Do we have any bread?”

Booker looked up from his newspaper. “Kommißbrot,” he said. “Do you want some?”

“Please.”

He served the dark bread, cutting a heavy slice and slathering it with hard butter from a dish kept in the area that served as their mess, a corner with baskets of nonperishables and an old cabinet for bread and fruit.

“The worst is over, Nicky thinks,” he said, sitting on Nicky’s side of the bed and helping Joe adjust, one arm supporting his back as he sat up to eat. Joe’s ribs lined up beneath his shirt, defined and insistent in their presence.

“It was definitely the worst I’ve ever had,” Joe said, taking a delicate bite. It had been so long since he’d chewed that it seemed he was relearning how to do it. Booker watched to make sure he didn’t choke. “How bad is the city?”

“It’s all of Europe. It’s the world.”

“How bad?” Joe lifted his gaze.

“Millions.”

The bread in Joe’s hand went back to the plate slowly. He’d been born when that number meant entire empires, entire continents.

“What can we do?”

Booker’s face twitched into a sneer before he could stop it.

“What?”

“We can’t _do_ anything, Joe.”

Joe considered this, his expression cool. “Nicky and Andy are out right now doing something.”

Booker didn’t want to have this discussion. He regretted letting his façade slip. There had been other times, late night arguments or philosophical debates, when it had been welcomed, encouraged. Immortals had too much time not to spend some of it thinking.

“You’re right,” he said, conceding the point and gesturing to the bread. “Keep eating. Nicky will be glad your appetite is back.”

“You don’t think we’re helping?”

“In a pandemic? No, I don’t.”

“What else should we do?”

They stared at each other. Booker was struck, not for the first time, how different they were, how well they complemented each other. Brothers, they called each other, in languages spanning the globe, across time and battlefields and arguments in front of a fireplace. Why had it been them, and not Maxence who stood beside him in the line of soldiers, or Ammar who had been Joe’s merchant apprentice? Why had Andy wandered for five hundred years alone, the first and the loneliest, before the stirring of Quynh in her dreams? They all had theories; none had been proven, or ever would.

 _What else should we do?_ “I don’t know, Joe,” he muttered softly. “I guess we should just keep doing what we’re doing.”

“It’s all we can do.”

“Yes,” Booker said, but he wished he could do one more thing.


	3. Chapter 3

**1813.**

They found him at the back of a pub in Białystok. He knew who they were as they entered, allowing the winter-hard air to sweep inside with the flurries around their ankles, because he’d been seeing their faces for months in his dreams.

Sébastien’s shoulders tensed as the woman at the front of the trio scanned the faces in the pub and finally settled on his. He wondered if it would be better to go with them quietly or to make a scene. As she settled in the chair across from him, his first impression was of her beauty, which had seemed almost ethereal in his dreams, too good to be true. Then he noticed the quiet confidence in the way she held her jaw, the firm poise with which she leaned back in the chair and nodded a greeting to him. He batted back both his attraction and his fear.

“Good evening,” she said. “We know you have questions.”

“You’re French,” he said in surprise.

“Nope.”

“But your accent—”

“What’s your name?”

He held it back. There was a trick here, surely, a warmaster’s play he couldn’t read yet. He had spent the last several months as unsteady as a drunken sailor, passing through the world and the trail he was carving in his muted urgency to get back to France without being known by any of the strangers around him. If there was anyone who was seeing several steps ahead, chess moves on the board that were to come, it was this woman he’d been dreaming about since the day he’d died.

She sighed in an aggravated way, as though he was enjoying wasting her time. “You should come with us. We can answer your questions in private.”

“I don’t have questions.”

“Like fuck.”

Sébastien blinked, almost bursting into shrill laughter. There was nothing in the world he wanted to do less than to go with these strangers whose faces he could recall better than his own sons’.

One of the men, the one with ashy hair and soulful eyes, leaned forward. His French was not as crisply pristine as the woman’s, and Sébastien understood suddenly that they were not his countrymen. One possibility to cross off. They weren’t secret police of some sort, a new type of supernatural hunter for deserters and criminals who had embarrassed the Republic. The man said, “We know you are scared. We’re here to make it easier for you.”

“You think this is easy?” Sébastien broke out, lowering his voice but raising his sudden fury. “You think it hasn’t been hell, seeing you like I know you, reliving my own death—”

“That’s enough,” the woman murmured sharply. “Not here.”

“I’m not going with you.”

“Please don’t make this difficult—”

“Andy,” said the ashy-haired one softly. Then he continued in a language Sébastien had never heard, something lilting and round.

The woman sat back, crossing her arms across her chest. After she seemed to deliberate for a moment, she continued. “Would you give us a chance to explain? In private?”

“I don’t need any explanations.” He turned his shoulder, dismissing her to continue nursing his drink. Maybe this time he’d find the oblivion he’d been seeking at the bottom of it.

She moved so quickly he couldn’t even gasp. Her hand struck hard and mean into his throat, paralyzing his vocal cords, and the ashy-haired one caught his tankard before it could tip. Then the woman and the dark-haired man, the one who had sat still and observant like a tiger in the brush, moved as a pair, lifting him at either side, dragging him away from the table towards the back door. The pub was small, and this fight attracted attention; Sebastian choked around his throbbing throat as the owner stepped around his station onto the pub floor, saying something in Polish.

The woman answered in kind, her smile disarming, more effective even than if she’d been relieving the pub owner of a weapon. She had no fear, no hesitation, and Sébastien loathed and feared and was awed by her.

The three strangers accompanied him out, allowing him his own steps once it was very clear he had no choice in the matter anyway. They went through the back door into a snowy alley and then frog-marched him further up, away from prying eyes or ears.

“If you’re going to kill me, just know it won’t work,” he rasped, coughing around his bruised voice box.

“Of course we know,” the woman said. “We’re the same.” She and the dark-haired one let go, not gently, with just enough thrust of a push that he stumbled back to strike against the back wall of another building. It was snowing prettily, tiny flakes accumulating on the shoulders of their clothing. He didn’t see another living soul, and the windows of the apartments above the shops were tight and closed, curtains pulled to muffle against the cold glass.

“What do you mean, you’re the same?”

“Ah, so you do have questions after all.” She made it a tease, trying to draw out his defenses like she had with the pub owner. The two men flanked her on either side, good soldiers with their general. There was nothing he was more tired of than soldiers.

“You can go fuck yourself.”

“Easy,” said the dark-haired one. “We’re friends here.”

“You are not my friends. If I’ve been bewitched, or cursed—”

“It’s not a curse,” the ashy-haired one said. He stepped forward, his gloved hand out and placating. “We don’t know why it’s us any more than you do.”

“What _is_ it?” Sébastien demanded, swatting away the hand. The dark-haired one twitched.

“Immortality,” the woman said. “Listen, it’s very cold out here. We have beer in our room—”

“Don’t touch me!” Sébastien barked, swatting away the ashy-haired one’s hand for a second time, following through with a left-hand punch he aimed well, right on the man’s jaw.

Pain burst in his side like a ripe fruit, and he gargled a scream before collapsing against the wall. He put his hands to the wound, a deep stab from a knife in the dark-haired one’s hand, which was dripping blood, his blood.

Blood gushed from him, as well, more than he’d ever seen in his life, pouring down his side in a stream.

“The liver? Really, Joseph?”

“He punched Nico.”

Sébastien slid down the wall, frantic breaths burbling from him. He lost feeling in his legs, then in his hands, which were struggling weakly to press in the blood that pumped from him.

“Now we have to deal with the blood—” was the last thing he heard.

Disoriented, he woke with his face pressed to a crocheted blanket. He grunted, snorting up a breath that he somehow knew was his first in several minutes.

“It’s very long, the first couple of times,” the woman was saying. She was sitting in an armchair facing him, one ankle crossed over the other knee. It was a very unladylike pose, and though Sébastien had known she wasn’t like other women, it still struck him in that moment that she was nothing like what he’d known before. Man or woman. General or footsoldier. She was new. One-of-a-kind.

He was lying on his face on a sofa, dumped unceremoniously so that one arm and his legs were dangling. They were in an apartment, dank and dusty with moth-eaten curtains. The blanket beneath his nose smelled of mildew. This was not their normal abode.

“He stabbed me,” Sébastien grunted, his voice breaking. He pushed up off the sofa, licking his dry lips.

“Yes, and he’s sorry,” the woman said, directing this over her shoulder at the dark-haired man, who muttered something in another language and prompted the ashy-haired one to roll his eyes.

“Who are you?”

“Andromache the Scythian. I also go by Andy.”

Neither name inspired much confidence in him. He groaned in residual pain as he righted himself, sitting heavily in the sagging sofa. His shirtfront was caked with drying blood, the wine-dark stain spreading all the way down his pant legs. He had bled merrily, exsanguinating into the snow. With shaking fingers, he probed the small hole in the cloth, finding nothing behind it. The skin of his belly was warm and smooth.

“Was that only your second time?” Andromache asked conversationally, watching this.

“What?” he asked stupidly, lifting his head to gaze at her as though she had spoken a foreign tongue instead of smooth French.

“It took so long. It gets faster, as time goes by.” She smirked at him, at his confusion. She seemed to say, ‘We needn’t have gone through all this if you had just listened in the first place.’

“Yes,” he found himself saying, as if his resistance had been beaten away already. It had only taken a single stab wound for him to break. “That was the second time I… died.”

“I wouldn’t try to keep count past that, if I were you.”

Sébastien leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, hiding his eyes with his hands.

“What’s your name?”

“Sébastien le Livre,” he croaked.

“ _Book_ ,” she said in English.

“Yes,” he said again. He didn’t have much English; that was one of the few words he understood without needing to think about it.

“This is Nicolò di Genova, and Yusuf al-Kaysani. They go by, er, several nicknames at this point?” The end of the sentence rose in a slight question, directing this back at them, as if to confirm. “The current ones are Joseph, Joe, Giù, and Nicholas, Nico, or Nicky.”

“But who are you?” Sébastien asked, finally letting his hands fall away from his face. “Why did I see you after I died?”

“We’re a group of immortals,” Andromache said, giving him no time to catch up. “We travel the world taking on responsibilities that should be done. We dream of each other when there’s a new one, until we’re able to come together.”

“So the dreams will stop now?”

“Yes.”

He choked on his relief. He was so tired of waking up in the middle of the night, gasping at breaths he couldn’t quite take in, the taste of salt water stinging the back of his throat.

“We understand it can be too much,” said the ashy-haired one, Nico, who appeared to hold no ill will for the punch from before. “We want to make this comfortable for you.”

“There is nothing _comfortable_ about this,” Sébastien spat. “I was killed on Napoleon’s front lines, but they saw me later, after I had woken up, and I was marked as a deserter, called a coward for faking my death which I screamed, I swore, had been real. It took… it was horrible, getting away. I have no money, I have no way to get home to my family, and I can’t even fucking get drunk the same way.”

“That’s why we are here,” Nico said. “To show you that you don’t have to do it alone anymore.”

Sébastien’s eyes burned with sudden tears. Over the months of this ordeal, realizations had soaked in. His name was marked, his family branded with the treachery of a deserter, spoiling the effort he’d put in to preserve his honor by joining the army in the first place, taking part in a fight he didn’t believe in to save what little his family had. He could never return to them, not truly, especially when some dark part of him had whispered that his sudden healing, as he dragged knives across his skin over and over in the hope that the wounds would stay open, was as much a curse as the beast from the fairy tales. He had nothing to live for and yet no life to give. He’d thought it through, sobbing spasmodically on the floor of his rooms: what if he wouldn’t age? What if he was stuck this way forever? His children, his boys, would grow and wither and die, and he’d have to see it happen.

“I’ve felt so alone,” he whispered.

“You have us now,” Andromache murmured. “You won’t ever have to feel that way again.”


	4. Chapter 4

**2019.**

Booker could smell the blood and brain matter on the back of Nicky’s head. Bile rose in his throat, and he swallowed, unable to avoid seeing the reflective sheen matting Nicky’s hair, the gush that had puddled onto his shirt collar. He turned his head towards the car window instead, watching the glittering silver of London’s streets flash by. Their nearest London safehouse was in Bermondsey, one of their most urban retreats. Traffic blessedly lightened as soon as they left the city center and crossed the Thames. They wouldn’t have to sit in this silence for much longer.

Exhaustion pulled at him, in a way that it never could have before his immortality. There was something to be said of living through the experiences that should have killed a man twice, thrice, a hundred times over. It wasn’t just the physical wounds a human body had to endure. At some point, the memories just became too much, a weight in the mind, leaving the head too heavy to hold up. He had wondered countless times over the past two hundred years just how the fuck Andy did it.

Maybe she wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t remember how old she was. Booker had sat in the university library in Salamanca once in the late 1800s, trying to do the math. Even the most generous – and by that, he meant shortest – estimation had astounded him. Three thousand years of life. Five hundred years of solitude before Quỳnh. Five hundred years of regret for losing her.

Joe’s rage had been justified, lying strapped to the hospital bed. Booker knew he had hurt them beyond words, beyond measure. He hadn’t meant for it to happen like this, of course not. No matter how much hurt living continued to inflict, no matter the agony he was enduring day in and day out with the lead-weight memories that seemed to fill his skull until there was no room for anything else, he had never wanted this. Andy and Joe and Nicky were his family more than anyone else, more than his wife and children could have been, and he’d never wanted to see them have to fight for their freedom in that way. And Andy’s mortality clawed at him now; how close he had come to murdering her was the most painful of it all. What if Copley or Kozak had not been able to stop the bleeding? He’d barely had a chance to explain. Joe’s sneer, _Well, now you have even more_ , had been a knife to the heart, a cruel twist that chipped bone on its way in. Booker didn’t know how he could have gone on if Andy had died today, but he didn’t know how he could have not gone on, either.

The guilt was bad, yes, but worse was his shameful regret that he hadn’t even accomplished what he’d meant to. A small part of him, which grew as the car ride droned longer, the tense silence in the car that was so unlike the road trips they had taken in the past, wished that Kozak had been allowed to continue her work, at least on him. Merrick’s greed and powerlust has been his downfall. If only he could have settled just for Booker. Booker would have allowed any test, a million tests, if it meant the result that Copley had promised. An end of disease for humanity, and an end for Booker. The closing chapter. The final page turned.

“We need clothes.”

Andy’s voice startled him so badly that he jerked, and he felt Nicky’s responsive flinch, their shoulders too wide not to touch.

“You’re the least bloody,” Joe said quietly, regarding her from the front seat. “Tuck in your shirt and wipe your face.”

Andy turned the car into a large carpark, the footprint of which spread out beside a shopping center with several dozen shops, and parked in one of the few free spaces. Other cars were all around them, on both sides, boxing them in. “I’ll be quick,” she said. “Does anyone have their wallet?”

Booker moved to bury his hand into the back pocket of his jeans, and Nicky flinched beside him again. He passed it to her over the shoulder of her seat, and she found his eyes in the rearview mirror very briefly.

“Stay here,” she said, a residual order from the days when those had been needed. Her soldiers did what she told them, but they had been hers long enough to do what she thought, as well.

She closed the car door and busied herself while standing beside it for a moment. Booker couldn’t help but watch the slow motions she completed, tucking the bloodstained shirt into her pants to hide as much of the stain as she could, wiping the smears from her injured face. She moved like a human now, already, carrying the wounds that would take days or weeks to heal. Then she was off, weaving between the other cars in the lanes of the carpark.

The air in the car was stifling now that they weren’t in motion, their destination paused. Booker choked on it, his chest tightening, and his breathing sharpened through his nose. Nicky could feel it through the touch of their shoulders and legs, he knew, because his head moved ever so slightly towards him.

Booker threw open the car door and almost puddled out of it, his legs supporting him only halfway before he sunk to the asphalt.

Joe hissed, “You can’t be seen—”

He scuttled backwards, his heels propelling him so that his back pressed to the sharp line of the bottom edge of the car’s chassis, his hands fisted into his hair and pulling slightly at the roots, needing the pain to focus on. He closed his eyes and rocked.

“Booker. Booker, you can’t…” Nile’s voice came low and soothing, hushed like she was speaking to him across a library table or a church pew. “Get back in the car.”

“CCTV,” Joe said, substantially less kind.

The car rocked slightly, and he heard a shuffle of motion behind him. Nile had climbed over Nicky in the backseat, crouching awkwardly on Booker’s seat. She put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing, tethering.

“Booker,” she murmured, her voice coming from just above his head. “I know it’s bad right now, and I’m sorry, but you have to put it off. Just a little longer. Just until we’re safe.”

He shook his head, counting the seconds of his breaths. In, 1234. Out, 1234.

“You have to. Later, I promise. I’ll be with you. Please get back in the car.”

He lowered his hands, crossing his arms on his knees where they were drawn up, and his head tipped backwards.

“Booker.”

He nodded. He took a few more slow breaths. Then he rose, climbing back onto his seat, which Nile vacated with the flexibility of the young and petite, returning to her side of the backseat while balancing skillfully to avoid crushing Nicky’s thighs with her heels.

Joe muttered something in one of the languages he shared only with Nicky. Booker didn’t rise to the bait, and he wiped away the sweat and baby tears from the panic that had gripped him, his face turned away from the two on his left.

When Andy returned, Joe spoke quietly, probably informing her, as she passed the plastic bags she had brought into the backseat to lay across Nicky’s lap. She didn’t reply and started the car.

At the safehouse, Booker walked behind the rest up the path to the front door. It was coming, he knew. The waiting was worse than the merciful fall of the guillotine, the punishment he very rightly deserved. He wanted to know, to be swept away in its current, but he also knew he didn’t deserve the release. If they wanted to keep him stewing, so be it.

They washed and changed. This safehouse was an actual home, an end-of-terrace in a line of otherwise-occupied family homes facing the industrial park that kept the prices low and the neighbors sightless to others’ comings and goings. This one had two bedrooms, and Booker couldn’t even look at the bed he had shared with Andy on all those nights they had needed to spend here. They had slept together like an old couple, sexless and tender, sometimes apart, sometimes cuddled for warmth and touch. He had slept beside all of them at one point or another, the familiarity between them allowing embraces without jealousy or lust. It was one of the few things he had truly, sincerely loved about his immortality: their connections, their relationship as a family and a team, were undefinable to any known convention, too inhuman to be written down or depicted to people with lives too short to develop them. They hadn’t needed words to describe what they had, so Booker didn’t have a word now to describe its loss.

Nile was rebraiding her hair with Nicky’s help, sat on the floor at his feet, when Booker came down the staircase, the last of them to shower and change into bloodless clothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs, looking into the living room. Nile had her eyes closed, her chin tipped slightly back, as she walked Nicky through the process, her hands up to guide by touch. Joe was sitting in an armchair facing the couch and the other two, eating a takeaway sandwich half-wrapped in plastic that Andy had picked up alongside the clothes. Andy was sitting in the opposite armchair. When Booker took the final step, she turned her head slightly.

“We need to decide,” she said to him, and the others looked up.

Booker nodded. At least it would be soon. The fall would be short. It’s just that there would be no relief at the end of it, no end to the spluttering and spitting that he associated with the execution his kind were immune to. That much he knew.

They piled back into the car, Nicky taking the front seat this time, Nile in the middle, putting distance between them. On the left side of the backseat, Booker blinked dully at the passing buildings, wondering what he would have to endure now.

A pressure on his hand startled him, and he looked down and then over at Nile, who was gazing at him with her eyebrows down. She had taken his hand where it rested on his thigh. Already, it was the tactile comfort of touch, of the language every member of his family spoke.

Booker’s lips pressed tight, and he looked away from her gaze again, letting the weight of all his memories and regrets and grief sink further down, weighing like nothing else in the world could. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the car window and held Nile’s hand for as long as she would let him.


	5. Chapter 5

**2019.**

The dealer slid his fingertips in a line along his chin, appraising Booker with the sly, sneering glance of a fashion designer. “You want up or down?” he asked in French, accented and oily.

“Down,” Booker said, holding out folded bills between his first and second fingers.

“Brother, you already look as down as it can go,” the dealer chuckled, taking the money and passing the small baggie in the other hand with a pat against Booker’s chest.

Booker caught the pills before they slid down the front of his jacket, turning away without replying. He didn’t give a fuck what he looked like, and the dealer shouldn’t either.

“Hey, don’t be sendin’ people my way, okay? I don’t like your look at all.”

Booker lifted his middle finger behind him as he retreated down the narrow alleyway, using the now-universal gesture that had grown as he had, global and wide-reaching. He knew all the ways to offend the most with a gesture, in all the countries he had ever visited, but this one was quick and satisfying.

Less satisfying was the angered, surprised shout behind him, and the pounding of shoes approaching from behind. He turned in time to block the thin-armed punch aimed into his ear.

“ _Ž_ _eli_ _š_ _biti pametnjakovi_ _ć_?” snarled the guy. He had been thrown off-balance by the blocked blow, but he used the momentum to regain his bearings, pushing up into the bigger man’s chest with his hands dug nastily into the lapels of his jacket. Booker had a good two stone on the guy, but the dealer had tweaker energy, whereas Booker was as tired as a dying farmer.

But Booker felt a burst of anger at the dealer’s childishness. He had done nothing except purchase what the slimy, skinny man before him was offering. He hadn’t argued at the exorbitant price, meant to take advantage of American college students looking for thrills on their cross-country trips to Europe. He hadn’t even started this fight.

“Let me go,” he said in French, trying for diplomacy first. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You need to learn manners.”

“ _Dijete_ ,” Booker spat, and broke the man’s left wrist between both of his own.

The dealer howled, reeling backwards, and Booker pursued with two fast boxer’s punches into his jaw, rattling with the first, dislocating with the second. The guy’s skull snapped against the wall of the building that formed the narrow alley, and he puddled down to the asphalt.

There were more urges now, the fight won but not conquered. He breathed harshly through his nose for a moment and then flung the baggie of pills into the ground next to the guy, stomping his boot onto it and grinding them into white powder with his heel. “Don’t let me see you here again,” he said.

It disgusted him, tore his insides as well as any frag grenade, but the ache for the blissful oblivion he had been seeking in those pills had been quieted, honed down to a dull edge. The violence, not the stupefying effects of the depressants, had helped.

He wouldn’t let himself become what that spoke to. None of his family had ever taken part in violence just for violence’s sake. Not even Andy and Quỳnh and Lykon, living back in the most dangerous times of history, had ever allowed themselves to be swallowed by that beast. Their form of justice, of fighting and killing, was done for a purpose. Lives were not taken because they were bored, or ill, or because they itched to. That was not why they had been cursed with immortality.

“Please!” cried a new voice. Booker halted, lifting his head to the danger. He’d walked through several side-streets away from the scene of the assault. Paris was no longer the city he had known in the early 19th century, for better or worse. How much the very world had changed in the last two centuries was overwhelming for him, the youngest – besides Nile, now. Let alone for Andy, who had borne witness to the invention of coins and horseshoes and glass. He had embraced technologies of the modern age because he had to, because someone in their group had to be able to use the internet and smartphones, and why shouldn’t it be the youngest?

If there was a single city he had to call home, Paris would be it. Because of that, and because he’d had two hundred years to wander its streets, and twenty-odd years of Google Earth to explore and memorize, he knew the city as intimately as he knew the lines in his own face. He turned down one last narrow street and came up into a back alley, a narrow pedestrian path taken up by two thugs in postmodernist hoodies and ankle-tight sweatpants, French streetwear at its finest, or at its most bizarre for Booker, who genuinely missed tailcoats.

“Hey,” he said, to make the thugs turn. He saw the young woman then, whose voice he had heard plead. She had her hands up, held soft near her chest in protection against the muggers flanking her.

“Fuck off, old man,” said one of the muggers, his hands full of the lady’s large handbag.

“Leave or fight,” he said.

“You serious?” said the second, laughing with a gape-jawed disbelief that was unkind to his long face.

“Serious. Put the purse down and walk away.”

“Nah, I’d rather fight.” The second mugger was taller, lankier, the leader, and he stepped forward a swipe with a knife that he’d palmed, used to convince the woman to give up her handbag.

The knife was short and didn’t reach Booker in that first swing, but the mugger must have thought himself a street-fighter, because he angled a kick into his stomach on the follow-through step, gloating at his victory already.

Booker dodged it and twirled, sidestepping into his own punches that were mean and sharp and far, far more experienced in actually winning a fight. His family didn’t pull punches when they sparred in hand-to-hand training. If you died fighting, you weren’t good enough, and you fought until you survived. This kid, no matter how many hours he’d spent laughing at his mates while going through the motions, would never be able to match the number of times Booker’s fist had connected with living flesh, crushing and crunching what lay beneath.

The mugger grunted with each blow, angry that he’d stumbled into this. He took the blows like a champ, though, driven now by adrenaline and the fear of being shown up in front of his friend. When Booker finished his first few moves, the thug drove his own fist deep into Booker’s stomach and took hold of the back of his shirt as he doubled over, kneeing up into the same spot and dislodging his jacket.

Booker struggled with the folds of fabric, now drawn up over his shoulders. He had to twist out of it like a hockey player, leaving it flapping in the thug’s hands as he freed himself and punched more. The mugger had not been expecting Booker’s dexterity; his bulk belied the swiftness with which he moved, especially now that he had his hands free while the thug was distracted with holding the jacket and his knife at the same time. As the mugger flung the jacket away in clear annoyance, trying to bring the knife in his hand up in defense, Booker socked him in the throat, driving the hyoid bone in.

The thug gurgled, finally scared. There was a shout behind them, and they both looked, sidetracked from their one-on-one. The second thug was rushing Booker, his own knife brought out like a jousting lance.

It had been stupid of him to shout before he could finish the move. Booker was able to step sideways in almost comedic timing, a casual shifting of his weight, watching mildly as the kid faltered and drew up short, trying to stop himself from stabbing his mate instead. When the second thug pivoted on his foot, focusing back on Booker, he snarled something under his breath that Booker couldn’t quite catch before avoiding the knife’s swiped arc.

“I said, _leave_ ,” the older man growled, having done enough damage for one day.

The muggers hesitated; the tall one held his throat in his hands, his eyes watered and streaming. He looked down at his friend. The friend looked back. They seemed to come to a decision.

The short one lunged. Booker punished him for it with a broken bone, catching his forearm between his own and using the leverage to fulcrum the elbow joint out of place. The thug screamed and tried to pull his arm back out of Booker’s grip.

Pain blossomed in his chest while he was releasing the arm, distracted long enough for the first mugger to pick up the knife he’d dropped when his vocal chords had been shocked. Booker roared and pulled away, already lamenting his shirt. Modern fashion was so much harder to repair and barely worth the cloth it had been cut from. In the old days, Andy had been able to stitch away tears, hiding under ruffles or layers or patterning that just wasn’t fashionable in the digital age. She’d taught them all how to sew and had even gone so far as to demonstrate how to weave, but there was hardly the need for that anymore. It was just one of the skills she had carried with her even before the immortality, so sacred and foundational that it had survived through the three thousand years of other talents and knowledge.

But he didn’t have Andy or the others anymore.

Booker savaged the tall one with his nails, clawing animalistically across his cheeks. The kid choked on the scream that couldn’t get past his swollen throat, let go of the knife handle, and pushed his friend ahead of him in an almost chivalrous gesture. At least he hadn’t abandoned him to Booker’s rage.

He took a moment to regain his bearings as he watched their retreating backs. Then he sighed and bent to pick up his jacket which the tall one had discarded.

“No, don’t move,” said a female voice. He looked over in the other direction at the mugging victim, having almost forgotten about her. He was surprised that she’d stayed during the fight. It would have been easier and probably much smarter for her to pick up the handbag the thieves had abandoned and run.

She approached with wide-eyed fear, her hands out like he was a wild animal who had been caught in a leg trap. “The knife,” she said, haltingly.

He followed her gaze and saw that the small knife was still embedded in his chest, centered nearly perfectly just above his right nipple. “It’s all right,” he said, putting his hand to the shaft. Would it be better to remove it now, in front of her, letting it heal and pretending he was injured, or to leave it be and try to get rid of her?

“Don’t take it off!” she cried.

“It’s fine,” he said, switching to English after recognizing the misuse of the preposition, hearing the subtle wobble to the accent. “I can go to hospital.”

“Let me take you,” she replied in the same language with relief. She was English, with a posh London accent.

“No, really, I’ll be okay.” He pulled the knife; the pain had been annoying, sharp every time he breathed. As the muscle and skin knit back together, he put his other hand over the hole in his shirt, hiding it.

“You’re not supposed to—! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to remove it?”

Her immediate instinct to scold had him unbalanced, and he smiled creakily at her. “How many fights have you been in?”

“Not as many as you, obviously. Here, let me get a cab—”

“No. Please.” He put his hand out, catching her with the barest touch of his fingers, as she passed him in the alley to head back to the main street. “I can take care of it myself. You should get off the street and decompress.”

“Decompress?” she echoed in disbelief.

“Please. It’s traumatic, being mugged.”

“I should think it’s traumatic being stabbed.”

 _Not as much as you’d think, actually_ , Booker thought to himself with wry bitterness. It helped to laugh at his immortality. It hurt to laugh, too. “I know you’re trying to be brave. No, actually, you _are_ being brave, but I need to make sure you’re okay. Go back to wherever you’re staying, please. Please.”

“What about you?” she asked, her face knit with concern.

“It’s not even bleeding anymore,” he said, showing her the fingers of the hand that was pressing down on the tear in his shirt. The stain of blood had not spread, and there was no active pulse of blood to be seen just beneath the fabric. It was a neat trick, showing her the healing without revealing the wound was completely gone.

The young woman followed the progression, her gaze going from the wound to his bloody hands to his face.

“Just be safe on the street,” Booker said, as if both of their minds were already made up.

“With someone like you out here, protecting us?” She smiled brightly, teasingly. The scars of the attack hadn’t set in, yet. He wondered if she would be able to smile as bright tomorrow, or a week from now, when the nightmares started. “I feel safer already.”

He took this with a gracious, embarrassed decline of the head.

“Thank you for stopping.”

Booker couldn’t help but smile gently. He didn’t want her gratitude. It was enough that she was unscarred. She gave him one last look, searching his face as if she was memorizing it. Perhaps she was. Then she turned and went down the alley, pressing her purse to her side beneath one arm, but her steps were not hunched in fear. She walked with confidence, a thiefsbane.

Maybe that was the secret. Maybe some wounds didn’t have to scar at all. Booker waited for her to round the corner before heading back the way he had come himself, putting distance between him and the violence he had twice committed this afternoon.

He wanted to talk to Andy. He wanted to talk to Joe, and to Nicky, and to Nile, who if she had been here would have looked at him with the same expression as the woman he had just saved. Challenging, yet appreciative. Conspiratorial. Kind.

Ninety-nine years and ten months to go. He could make it. He would have to, to make it back to them.


End file.
